American McGee's;
Alice

Game:

Late one night, fire rips through Alice’s house, killing her parents and scarring her physically and mentally. While her body lays catatonic in Rutledge Asylum for over a decade, her psyche remains imprisoned in Wonderland, now a twisted reflection of her own dementia.

Comments:

In the dim and hazily remembered antiquity of several years ago, the hype machine was practically wetting itself over one American McGee (yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a made-up name) and his twisty reinterpretation of the Wonderland mythos. His bloody, semi-sexualized take on Carroll's classic characters intrigued many at the time. (I myself was drawn in by the ad's alone with their freaky little poetry. "My knife will slice your heart in half...")
And then it was released...

Frankly, I didn't know what to think. Many proclaimed the game the second coming n' a box of Oreos. A few lone voices in the wilderness seemed to want the thing purged with fire from their memory. (Penny Arcade got in a bit of trouble with their satire. Likewise, Old Man Murray's far from dispassionate review remains one of the funniest things the now sadly moribund site ever produced.)
I finally had a chance to pick up 'Alice' por nada earlier this month, and if there's one thing my Games section was designed for, it's beating a dead horse.

The problem with 'Alice's atmosphere is not that it lacks subtlety (which being a mock-up of Carroll it does of course) but that it doesn't go nearly far enough. I can't believe I'm saying this, but the game needed to be much more goth. They could have amped up the grue; you know, the walls made of skulls, copious corpses, have you fighting mutilated bunnies approach. My preference would have been to twist the whole thing down a sort of Tim Burton neon nightmare route. (To American's credit, I think that's what he was kind of going for. But dude, it's Lewis Carroll. The crazy factor's already turned up to eleven. You've gotta do better than vaguely sinister flowers and chess pieces if you want to freak us out.)
There are some nicely odd bits. For example; the huge worm-like tendrils of the Red Queen that seemingly devour the landscape, the hateful monologues of the Jabberwock. However, such disparate elements are scattered across the surface of what is a standard boring platformer. There is nothing particularly dark and twisted about hopping around a mushroom patch fighting ladybugs, no matter how much attitude you have while doing it.

Of course, if you want to discuss emo-ian angst, just getting around the damn fungus fields might have you shrieking curses to the heavens. Button schematics are clumsy and unresponsive, even after being customized. Control polish ranges from- "Dang. She's hanging on the ledge, but she's too close to a polygon angle to climb it, so I'll have to jump down and do it again." -all the way to- "G*d-fu@&ing-dammit! Would you just jump to the next rock when I tell you to, you stupid limey twat? Or do you gain some odd sexual gratification from being crushed to death by crawdads rolling pebbles!?" (Actually they were ants, silly me.)

Hell, frankly, there are far too many jumping puzzles in total for the game to work, especially given the hit or miss nature of the engine's mechanics. A green pair of shoeprints is supposed to aid you as a jump vector, but it disappears when the platforms are not level. Likewise, grabbing onto vines in mid leap is not even remotely precise.
It was a cute idea to make Alice's arsenal a collection of modified kiddie toys, but like the game entire, it's a sweet concept that was granted a very half-assed conception. Your weapons are simply not effective. They tend to deal too little damage, and lack precision overall. Even worse, they generally have a charge delay either before or after (or sometimes both) every use. (Card guy coming, throw knife, he dies. Oh there's another one, but my knife hasn't regenerated yet. Switch to cards, realize it take five to ten card throws to down him. Take a hit or two, pick up the gem he drops to reenergize. This is the combat folks. Repeat until you can't take the tedium any more.)

Further problems materialize in the form of graphics hiccups and temporary freezing. This happens almost like clockwork when starting a level, firing a new weapon, or decapitating an enemy. In addition, load times can often take up to one minute. (And keep in mind, I was playing the game in low-memory settings.)
Now I don't want to beat 'Alice' over the head. (Especially in this section, given as production values are probably the game's highlight.) Something tells me I'd probably like this American fellow face to face, and while the game itself is entirely under whelming, I can appreciate the amount of effort that went into it.
One big selling point was music by somebody-or-the-other from 'Nine Inch Nails'. There are some nicely haunting little dirges, but a lot of the 'discordant music box' type tunes just tend to bleed into the background.
Graphics, while no big shakes today were remarkably well realized for their time period. Later levels-especially those in looking glass land-belie the type of orderless dementia that the game was trying to aspire to but never quite reached. Character models are a bit blocky, but since we are dealing with stylized animated figures, they still manage some effective design.
Perhaps the best critters in the whole game are the Phantasmagoria. The creature looks like your typical grim reaper, until it's cloak unfolds into a hellish, shrieking rorschach blot. (It's somewhat reminiscent of that elemental thing at the end of the 'House on Haunted Hill' remake, save for the blatant suckery.)

Pity such bugaboos are the scariest this game has to offer. The setup of Alice's guilt and insanity is disturbing enough to carry much more weight than it's allowed to. Thematically, the game almost reminds one of 'Silent Hill 3'. They both center around the angst of an adolescent girl, and both feature fire trauma and orphanage as symbols for one's childhood being ripped away. However, where as 'SH3's symbolism embodied menstruation and penetration anxiety (yeah, that's a whole 'nother review kids) here it's um... green scary doors and dismembered playing cards than try to drive us to the brink of madness!
(Oh, maybe the doors represent the dizzying transition from adolescence to adulthood, and the dismemberment the frightening prospect of Alice being cut adrift to fend for herself or... ...oh someone just slap me already.)
There may be a few fonts of blood and exploding noggins, but after you've faced off again' Pyramid Head, you're kinda spoiled when it comes to Freudian manifestations of psycho-centric evil.

Again, to be fair your final confrontation with the Red Queen is horrifying at the very least. The embodiment of Alice's id (and I hope no one is anal enough to consider this a spoiler, you know from the beginning that the entirety of the game takes place inside her head.) her initial form is something of a cross between a harlequin and a 'Resident Evil' style entity. After you blow that up, well, you're going to have to face off against something really icky if you ever want to walk out of that padded cell and into your sunny future. (Which, since Alice has no family, home, and her familial assets were probably depleted during her commitment -and of course let us not forget the Victorian stigma against mental illness that would bar her from as a schoolmarm or domestic servant- would be what? Prostitution or petty theft? Sorry, I do so hate a happy ending that doesn't belong.)

There's no denying that there's good stuff rattling around in 'Alice', but weird and lazy don't mesh together well. (I only make it look easy.) It's is a great concept, and one that deserved a hell of a lot better than to be plunked into this pedestrian 'Crash Bandicoot' wannabe universe.

| Home | Reviews | Faqs | BogBlog | Links | Misc. |